By Drew Himmelstein for the Midcoast Villager.

Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for New England News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

A program that’s been nurturing Rockland-area teens for the last 30 years is now inspiring new homegrown versions of similar programs all over rural Maine — and the data shows that they are working to help make adolescents more resilient and emotionally healthier.

Don Carpenter, the longtime executive director of Trekkers, a trips and long-term mentoring program for seventh to 12th graders from Owls Head, Rockland, Thomaston, South Thomaston, St. George and Cushing, left the organization in 2016 and launched the Aspirations Incubator, a foundation-backed program designed to foster and fund new, independent youth development programs in rural Maine modeled on Trekkers principles. Now, with the first cohort of students who entered the new programs as seventh graders having finished high school, a University of Southern Maine study has shown the new programs to be effective in shaping students who are more resilient, more connected to their communities and who perform at a higher level academically than their peers — just like the students in Trekkers.

Fun and games and leadership

Madelyn MacCaffray, 18, stood at the front of a classroom on a Monday night in January, getting ready to lead a game for her peers.

“I’ll just wait until everyone is ready to hear my instructions,” said the Camden Hills Regional High School senior, with the practiced authority of a teenager who’s comfortable at the front of a room.

The room quieted down pretty quickly after that, and after MacCaffray explained the rules to a spinoff of the game “Mafia” in which participants “kill” each other through eye contact and then stick out their tongues like frogs, more than a dozen high school juniors and seniors were soon dying dramatic deaths in their seats in a rousing session of “Froggy Murder.” One teen was so committed to acting out his demise that the back of his chair cracked as he fell over in it. “I don’t know if this should go in the newspaper,” he joked as he glanced at the reporter in the room.

These students have been a part of Trekkers since they were in seventh grade, and now they're training to be student leaders. The games are fun, but they’re not just for fun: Later this spring, many of the students here will chaperone seventh graders on their first Trekkers trip to Acadia National Park, and they will need to be ready to lead these games for the younger students to keep them busy and having fun and give them opportunities to bond.

Drawn by the promise of regular travel beyond the borders of Midcoast Maine, about 20 new seventh graders enter Trekkers every year, and, if all goes well, they will continue with the program for six years through their high school graduations. During that time, as they go through one of the most tumultuous periods of a person’s life, they’ll spend six years supporting each other and being supported by program staff and a web of participating community organizations and volunteers. And the time they invest will pay dividends: Trekkers students exhibit more emotional control and show fewer challenges in their adult relationships than their peers, and they outperform them in school attendance and GPA, according to a 2023 study by the University of Southern Maine. Buoyed by continuous community support, Trekkers students also enroll in college and continue in higher education at greater rates.

It’s a resource-intensive program that involves cultivating a wide net of relationships over a period of years, and it’s not something that can simply be copied and repeated. But by teaching the principles that are the foundation of Trekkers’ success — and by supporting each emerging program with startup funding — the Aspirations Incubator aims to encourage new programs that are molded in the Trekkers tradition but that are also unique and authentic to their own communities.

With five programs started through Aspirations still active and more expected to enter the incubator in 2026, the Trekkers special sauce is spreading out from its headquarters in Rockland throughout rural Maine, and improving the social, emotional and educational outcomes of young people.

Protective factors

In the world of public health, many people have become familiar with term “adverse childhood experiences,” or ACEs; these are traumatic experiences in childhood that evidence shows can have long-term negative health impacts. For instance, having a parent who abuses substances or witnessing domestic violence as a child are both ACEs.

But there are also protective factors — conditions in a young person’s life that will fortify their mental health and pay long-term positive dividends in their lives. These include gaining competence in social and emotional skills, having access to material support in times of need and having strong relationships with friends, extended family and the wider community. Through its design as a long-term mentoring program that builds relationships between young people and supportive adults, Trekkers constructs many of the protective factors that will strengthen young people’s mental health and set them up for positive opportunities after high school.

“We are investing in the lives of young people to ensure that they feel like they have a sense of connection and belonging within their communities, and that they feel like they have something to contribute,” said Meg Taft, executive director of the Rural Youth Institute, which now houses the Aspirations Incubator.

Trekkers got its start in 1994 as an outdoors program for Thomaston youth; the first expedition for what was then called “Thomaston Trekkers” was a canoe trip for middle schoolers. From the beginning, the focus was on connecting students with adult mentors, but it was not until program co-founder Jack Carpenter’s nephew Don Carpenter joined the staff in the late 1990s that the current program model started to take shape.

“I wanted to have it be deeply relational,” Carpenter said. Before coming to Trekkers, he had studied environmental education and spent five years running summer programs for at-risk kids in Pittsburgh, where he saw kids enter and leave year to year without much continuity.

“It was a very transactional model,” said Carpenter. Many youth development programs, he said, focus on providing a service, such as summer enrichment, but don’t push beyond that at all. Instead, he wanted to focus on long-term mentoring and building deep relationships to support kids’ success over time.

Today, kids apply to Trekkers in seventh grade, enticed by the promise of annual trips to places like Acadia National Park, Washington, D.C., and the Grand Canyon. But between the trips, they meet regularly as a group with program staff in Rockland, building leadership skills and making collective decisions as they work together and plan their trips. They learn to trust each other, program staff, and other adult mentors.

“We just want to build relationships; it doesn’t matter what activities we do,” said Diane Sternberg, Trekkers’ program and training director. “It’s not like we’re a success if we visit six states in a year. We’re a success if people feel supported.”

Trekkers works in close partnership with families, schools and community organizations and welcomes in community volunteers. It’s all part of the goal of creating a community of caring adults that teens can lean on during tough times, said Taft, who noted that different young people need different levels of support. Some students are well-supported at home and have access to lots of resources; others may face a lot of challenges and will need a high level of school and community support to thrive. The Trekkers and now Aspirations models, Taft said, attract a mix of students, with most of them falling somewhere in the middle. They have a mixture of strengths and challenges.

“The Trekkers model is primarily a prevention model,” Carpenter said. Being a teenager is a tumultuous experience, he said, and teens are “one decision, one crisis, one experience away from falling over the edge of being at-risk. And the worst time to try to build a relationship with a young person is when they’re in crisis.”

Upon leaving Trekkers, Carpenter joined forces with the Lerner Foundation (later to be called the Rural Futures Fund), which was looking to develop youth programming that would improve participants’ post-secondary opportunities. The leadership was particularly interested in spanning the transition between middle school and high school for rural students, who often move from an intimate K-8 school to a larger regional high school with less personalized attention.

Carpenter distilled Trekkers down to a set of core principles, like fostering a sense of belonging in youth, exposing young people to novel perspectives and experiences and developing leadership through empowerment. On the basis of that framework, in 2017 the Rural Futures Fund launched the Aspirations Incubator to support eight existing community organizations in Maine in starting their own long-term mentoring programs for seventh through 12th graders (each site was awarded $600,000 over the first six years, plus extensive training).

Six years later, as the first class of seventh graders was graduating from high school, five of the Aspiration Incubator’s programs were still running, including the Waypoint program at Bath’s Midcoast Youth Center and 4-H’s North Star program, which operates at several sites including Tanglewood in Lincolnville, plus Belfast’s Game Loft (which has since closed). A long-term study following that first class through their high school graduations in 2023 found that, compared with their peers, participants in the programs attended school more, did better on exams and felt they mattered more to the people in their communities.

“It’s creating a sense of belonging,” Carpenter said. “They just need to be part of a group.”

The Aspirations Incubator is now accepting applications for new community organizations that are looking to start similar programs, so the seed that started at Thomaston Trekkers will only continue to spread. Each new program has its own personality and is not necessarily themed around travel, but whether the programmatic focus is on outdoor education or board gaming, the commitment to long-term mentorship and relationship building will always lie at the heart of the Aspirations Incubator programs.

The program marked a transition at the end of 2025; the Rural Futures Fund, having intentionally spent down its assets, closed its doors, and Carpenter, having worked himself out of a job, stepped down. The Aspirations Incubator now has a new permanent home at the newly launched Rural Youth Institute.

“We very intentionally named ourselves the Rural Youth Institute and not the Maine Rural Youth Institute, with the idea that this could certainly grow and inform and be a tool for rural communities beyond Maine,” said Taft, the organization’s first executive director.

For now, though, the incubator is firmly focused on Maine, and more Maine rural communities can continue to benefit from its work to support young people during the uncertainty of adolescence.

Henry Ackor, 18, one of the older Trekkers training to be a mentor, said he remembers how much he looked up to older students when he was in seventh grade, and he wants to be that influence for younger kids. He, like many Trekkers graduates, intends to return as a volunteer even after he starts college at the University of Maine in Orono in the fall.

“As a kid, you see a teenager and you want to follow and do what they do. So that’s why it’s so important to set a good example,” Ackor said. “As a seventh grader, I thought I was there to have fun, but as a leader, the goal is connection and consensus and cooperation and learning to work together.”

Back in the classroom, the last game of the night was “Entourage,” a massive rock/paper/scissors contest in which the losers immediately joined the cheering section of the person who had defeated them. When the final match concluded, all the kids surrounded the winner in a loud, ecstatic group, rooting them on.

Drew Himmelstein wrote this article for the Midcoast Villager.

Source: Public News Service